


Questions of Science and Progress

by Canarii



Series: Hide and Seek [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-07
Updated: 2009-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:11:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canarii/pseuds/Canarii





	Questions of Science and Progress

Time travel. It's the sort of thing you let yourself dwell on in younger years. The pure fantasy of it all validated your idle daydreaming to the extent that hidden deep in the boxes of your childhood things, sits a journal full of plans. Places, people, circumstances, fanciful dreams of a girl who wanted to imagine the impossible. When you were nine, a proper 1880s expedition through the exotic and unknown had been the object of wonder. You'd filled pages with pack lists, false adventure entries, maps torn out of magazines dotted and marked with the places you'd go.

In its time this would pass, replaced with the sort of awe and admiration for the 1920s that only an eleven-year-old girl could conjure. Roguish gangsters, flapper girls, both rebellious and sophisticated with their boy-cut bobs and knee length dresses. Prohibition, speakeasies, it all held a sort of forbidden glamour for you, a small, skinny awkward girl on the crossroads of growing up.

When you were thirteen, you read the complete works of Emily Dickenson and Poe, turning the pages with chipping black fingernails. It was the closest thing to a full-scale teenage rebellion you'd ever have. The journal, beginning to be weathered by years, is over half full when you describe your perfect tea party. Edgar could sit at the end of the table, next to the Bronte sisters, and Jane Austen would do quite well across from them. You write out the menu, and add notes on questions you'd ask, before setting the journal down and returning your eyes to 'Funeral Practices of the 19th Century.'

When you were sixteen, dozing off in your French Culture class, you thought Paris was for sure the place. And not today's Paris, you wanted to see it in the early 60s. You slip the journal out of your book bag and turn past the many filled pages until you finally find a blank sheet. You don't wear nail polish like you used to, but even now, the idea of straightening your long blonde hair, and walking through the streets of Paris, effortlessly mod in casual black occupies your thoughts. You write out your daily itinerary instead of taking notes on the construction of the Lourve and get lost in the daydream.

You forget about the journal for years, always thrown in some bottom drawer, or the back of your dresser. It's only by accident you find it again, unpacking in your new flat. The first week of university and you've never been away from home like this before. You don't know whether you like it or not yet. A girl in your History class smiled at you today, when you crept into the hall five minutes late, nervous and embarrassed. She said her name was Kathy Nightingale, and that night you pen out a single sentence in the journal, wondering if all birds dream about flying away.

The journal, which seems so small now in your adult hands, tattered and stained but still with a few, bare, empty pages is tucked into the pocket of your coat that night. You haven't written in it in years, your camera has replaced it in your hands. The night, like more than one night before, you semi-legally crept onto the property of an old house, a cemetery, a church, to fill your film rolls with glimpses of a past you'd never know outside your dreams. It felt appropriate, to have it there, tucked close to her heart the night it all ended. The night the dreaming died.

You never forgot about it, but you never really remembered. The irony was, when the opportunity finally came, a lifetime of dreaming and plans didn't matter anymore. You never showed anyone the journal, never even told the Doctor about it. You kept it with you, but you didn't read it, not for months. It's bent, the spine broken, the pages creased, edges of newspaper clipping and magazine pictures poking out roughly at the edges. It's had water, or tea spilled on it at more than one occasion, and even your neat handwriting has begun to fade from the earliest pages.

There's one page left blank, the last one. You think your hands shake a bit as you finish the story. And then he's calling you; with that sort of excited whooping from the console room that only means something wonderful or horrific is about to happen. You leave the journal on your bed, left open to its final entry, and run off into the unknown.

 _Dear Kathy, it's nothing like I thought it would be. I only wish you could be here to see it with me.  
-Sally Sparrow_


End file.
